Hello friends!
We had an amazing game this week, met a really nice player, got to experience one of the most changed factions of the most recent update, and generally had a ball! We even got to see the single biggest tank in all of Warhammer and not have to get smeared off the board by it! Boy oh boy, lots to report this week so lets get right to it!
Match Prep
I play Warhammer 40k on Fridays after I work a full day. As this game is so complicated and, my job tends to run me through the ringer, AND I have a brain injury that effects my memory I decide to show up to this game with some pretty extensive notes to keep me straight.
Here are the notes for a single unit: a ten-strong group of Lootas lead by a Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun:
There is an uncomfortable amount to keep straight here.
Essentially this is just a breakdown of the specific weapons used, the effects they, the units holding them, and the unit leading them all provide with their conditions. I kept all the wording as simple as possible too. All and all this ended up about 6 pages long in total and was invaluable over the course of the game.
Take a look at my "Special Moves" I'm hoping to pull off:
This is ghibberish to anyone who doesn't study play Warhammer 40k. Let's get straight to the game!
The Game
This week I brought a mechanized Ork Dread Mobb to the store. My Dread Mobb is centered around a giant kustom Gorkanaught called Krataface, the insane Meks who built it, and the clouds of goblins that worship it. These lads love nothing more than charging into battle head first, having a proper fight, and taking the scrap home to work on new inventions! I love my army :)
You can picture my lads in your imagination like this:
This week I met a new Opponent we'll call B. They are playing the Adeptus Mechanicus, the technology obsessed worshipers of the Machine Spirit who are so useful to the Imperium of Man they just accept them. The AdMech hail from mars, have giant spider tanks, all their units are cyborgs-type things and look a lot like this:
My opponent and I took terns deploying and setting up our army before we could throw they at each other. This is a really fun process where we each explain our units, what they do roughly, and do our best to count each others deployments. The game can be won or lost in this base quite easily.
My opponents board ended up looking something like this:
My opponent has each flank covered with squads of troopers who hope to take objectives. The middle of the board is held down by a mass of highly damaging servitors led by a engineer. On each side of the servators are Dunestriders, spider tanks with massive weapons. The one on the right side I was pre-warned has a super weapons.
The AdMech are awesome and, recently in the meta, they have been hot garbage. In the ~20 armies that battle in the 41st millennium, they were one of the worst. They recently got a new set of rules that made the units cost much more but, at the same time, were made much stronger. This took the AdMech from a bottom tier army to an unknown factor most are terrified of and with good reason.
Before the battle even started my opponent explained that nuke-fog and rockets were raining down in my deployment zone and all my units had to choose to dive to the ground and be slightly safe or stand glorious firm. This is the kind of thematic rules that I love. My goblins held down their objectives and the worst of the damage was suffered by my battlewagon.
This meant it was time to charge right on in!
KrataFace was holding down the right side of the board while my BattleWagon, a very impressive ork battle-trukk/tank, was holding down the left. Unfortunately, remember that super weapon? It damn near one shot my battlewagon after it had a single round of firing! BRUTAL!
A few turns later some seriously hot rolls had the servators nearly gone and the second dunestalker and its engineer engaged by an ork warboss and three heavily armored ark bodyguards with chainsaw hands. As you would imagine, those guys do some serious work and, before we knew it, the engineer was in pieces.
Now it was time to Krata-Face to pull a sneaky and try and win this game. Orks are VERY swingly, blow themselves up, and are high risk high reward. Playing them feels like lighting fireworks and I love it. My opponent knew I was going to charge his super weapon so, what did I do? KrataFace pooped out his squad of Lootas in the middle of the board with no cover and busted through a goddamn wall and tried to kill his 10 troopers in one magnificent attack.
Friends, it was magnificent. Ol' Krata slammed his Klaw of Gork down into the mechanical cockroaches. Unfortunately, I had not really considered one thing: overkill. I smashed half the squad off the boad but essentially did three damage to a bunch of one damage units and two thirds of the kick-ass I brought to bear essentially went to waste.
You know those orks were having a ball though. This was a propa great chop!
Unfortunately, over the next turns the remaining AdMech simply got an upper hand on my force. I called the game as a win for my opponent where my orks had put up a great fight and headed home to my wife with the biggest grin on my face. I love this game!
The Biggest Tank
This Friday there were a few players around training for a tournament coming up the next day. This tournament was a massive scale game and this is an opportunity for people to bring out the biggest, most expensive, and most ungodly destructive units. Among these was whats called a Baneblade, the single largest tank in the Warhammer universe I know anything about. This this likely costs as many points as the entire ork force I just played with and likely has twice as much firepower.
Lots bask in it's glory, friends. Thanks for reading and
